


No Easy Walk To Freedom

by Spatz



Category: Nikita (TV 2010)
Genre: Backstory, Coffee, Computers, First Meetings, Gen, Hacking, Prison, Recruitment, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 20:10:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spatz/pseuds/Spatz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hacking is 90% hardware and 10% software: 90% knowing how a thing works, and 10% figuring out the people who made it. It's the 10% that'll get you screwed – or save you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Easy Walk To Freedom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gothicgunslinger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothicgunslinger/gifts).



Birkhoff knows he’s fucked when he is escorted right past the prison transport and into the waiting doors of the creepy black SUV, which might as well be pink and bedazzled with GOVERNMENT GOONS INSIDE XXX for all the stealth it has.

When the goons stab him with a syringe right outside the gates and everything goes black, he isn't even surprised, just sort of pissed he hadn't gotten a final word in.

* * *

Birkhoff didn't do well in prison.

At least, not until he could talk a guard into accessing one of his accounts, and then he did _very_ well in prison -- as long as he stayed out of gen pop, because he inevitably ended up pissing off some violent hulking criminal in the yard who didn’t appreciate his superior criminal skills. _So_ not his fault.

Fortunately, his guard friend was very accommodating. For the right price. Birkhoff had a lot of friends like that.

* * *

His first thought when he sees Percy is _suit_.

And then Percy smiles, and he thinks, _shark_.

Later, Birkhoff figures that kind of keen observational skill is what keeps him alive through the ensuing conversation, and the job offer, because he learns enough about Percy's fucked up job interviews to know that most of them end in cancellation, not recruitment. It’s like auditioning to play Marie Antoinette with a real guillotine.

(Yet somehow, Birkhoff still found himself shocked at Percy’s exit interview technique when it finally happened right in his face. Stupid of him. There's a reason that cancellations are one of the few things not internally recorded by Division. Bad for morale when Papa Bear starts mauling the baby bears on camera. He should have known better.)

* * *

Birkhoff cracked open another Red Bull and swigged half of it in one go, leaning back in his chair. The debate was still raging online between the coffee traditionalists and the energy drink fanatics, but Birkhoff had come down on the side of efficiency: a can was just a hell of a lot faster than staring at the coffee pot while it gurgled its way to the finish. Plus, the caffeine high was amazing.

Sometimes, though, he missed coffee: the bitter-rich taste, the warm smell, even the way it went stale in your mouth after ten hours straight of coding. But needs must as the caffeine drives. He didn’t have time to be sentimental.

Setting the can aside, he tapped out a command and pulled up his Wall Street Assholes program. He’d collected about fifteen assholes of the highest caliber at this point, and his code was scrolling away, stealing a little money every time they made a transaction. The more money they were making, the more he stole. He’d explained it to some n00b online last week who hadn’t appreciated his awesomeness, but it was kinda poetic, he thought. Very Robin Hood - Errol Flynn, not that Kevin Costner shit.

A knock sounded at the door, and he rolled his eyes. Seriously, the goddamn clipboard people needed to find a new neighborhood to bug.

This asshole just kept knocking, though, so he got up and stomped over to yank the door open.

“What?” he snapped -- and then registered the badges, the cheap suits, and the not-quite-hidden handguns.

“Mr. Seymour Birkhoff, aka ‘Shadow Walker’?” the oldest of the dour-faced men asked, and Birkhoff could fucking _hear_ the condescending quotation marks, even through his rising panic. “You’re under arrest.”

* * *

This Percy guy might be the sharkiest suit he’s ever met, but Birkhoff, being Birkhoff, can’t stop himself from saying, “So if this isn’t an interrogation, is there any chance of getting some coffee in here, Jeeves?” He can’t tell if his headache is caffeine withdrawal or syringe-crap hangover, but he’s pretty sure coffee would be awesome either way. Not that it’s likely to happen, but hey, he can dream.

“Shadow Walker,” Percy intones, ignoring him, and there’s no condescending quote marks this time, but Birkhoff figures they just drowned in all the sarcasm. “I’ve heard quite a few stories about you. How _did_ you break into the Pentagon back in ‘93? You were young, but you never repeated the stunt.” He smiles tauntingly. “Couldn't get back in?”

Birkhoff hesitates for like half a second, then decides it’s more important to impress the guy running the black kidnapping SUVs (even if the dude really is government), than to keep secrets about a hack he’s already been convicted for.

So he smirks right back, and says, “Dude, I never left.”

Percy doesn’t even have the grace to look surprised. He just says, “ _Really_ ,” and smiles. The hairs creep up on Birkhoff's neck, and he flexes his hands against the handcuffs locking him to the chair. “So why didn't you sell that information to the highest bidder? Or the press?”

Birkhoff shrugs, not wanting to say that his beef wasn't with the saps who got suckered into serving Uncle Sam, just the assholes in charge. Instead, he scoffs and says, “What am I, Deepthroat? Please. And it's not about breaking in, it's about _access_. Jokers have hacked the CIA, FBI, NSA, you name it, but how many people do you hear about _staying_ in?” He paused dramatically. “Nobody. Because if you fucking brag about it, they shut you down.”

“Discretion is the better part of valor?” Percy murmurs.

“Exactly.”

“Except you got caught.”

“No, I got sold out, waaay after the fact. And I’ll prove it to you. My access point should still be good, if I can get my hands on a half-decent computer.”

“I can even provide an entirely decent one,” Percy says, and gestures. One of the Hulks near the door comes forward and unlocks Birkhoff’s cuffs, and looms at him until Birkhoff follows Percy out the door. They pass down a long corridor, all bare concrete and metal piping: government budget meets apocalyptic bunker, very nice, in that actually-not-at-all way. At the end of the hall, Percy punches a code into an outdated keypad - Birkhoff recognizes the model, and twenty-five seconds with a screwdriver would get him in without even having to boot up a hard drive - and waves Birkhoff in with a mocking tilt of his head.

A red-headed woman straightens up from a computer at their entrance. She is wearing a dress, white as snow, but so sharp that all Birkhoff could think was _ice_. She smiles politely, the motion delayed just enough that he can tell it’s calculated, and he resists the urge to shiver.

“Percy,” she says warmly, “I just finished with McLaren. He gave up the coordinates.”

“Excellent work, Amanda. Though, you have a little something....” Percy gestures.

The woman looks down at her white dress, which, now that Birkhoff really looks, is spattered with tiny red dots. She tskes in exasperation. “Of course I do. The man’s as much of a mess dead as he was alive.”

Birkhoff goes cold. It sounds like they’re discussing paperwork, or something, but there is the telltale red -- _blood_ red, already fading into rust.

She just killed someone, and they’re joking about it.

He swallows bile, and stands very, very still until Percy notices him again.

Then he breaks back into the Pentagon, pulls up some classified files and says, “Hey, look, Clinton’s bombing Iraq this week. Just in time for Christmas and his Congressional impeachment hearings. I don’t care what people say, the man’s got style.”

And Percy smiles.

* * *

Seymour got his first computer when he was thirteen. Technically, his father bought it for work, but he always switched to the television after five, and then Seymour took over. On the weekends, Seymour stayed up all night and slept all day. Mom wasn’t around anymore to tell him to knock it off, and screw her anyway for leaving. The first few Mondays like that were hellish -- even more than middle school usually was -- so he dug his mom’s abandoned coffee pot out of the closet and started brewing coffee in the garage where his dad wouldn’t smell it.

Eventually, he saved enough money to buy his own computer, a creaky old 386 that he pushed to its limits. Between the heat off the overclocked CPU and his illicit caffeine, his room was the warmest place in the house.

When their waking hours did rarely cross, his dad inevitably asked, “Still wasting all your time on that thing? Jesus, no wonder you can’t get a date.”

Seymour didn’t tell him that he was learning more on ‘that thing’ than he ever had in school, about computers and code and the lies that kept the elite in power, and the things he could do to fight back.

After he hacked into the Pentagon, Seymour brought the coffee pot into the house and stopped talking to his dad at all. He didn’t want to waste his time.

* * *

Four years pass, hacking databases at Percy’s whim until Shadownet is born, invisible and sprawling and beautiful. He learns how to run operations, teaches basic computer skills to ungrateful teenagers, and watches a lot of recruits end up dead -- most would have anyway, he knows, the death sentence being what it is in this country.

He stays as far away from Amanda as humanly possible. Michael, after he joins up, is surprisingly helpful with that. Birkhoff wonders what a guy like him is doing at Division -- for all of the five seconds it takes to hack his file. Then he stops asking. For an ex-military dude, Michael’s alright. Birkhoff doesn’t want to go poking at raw wounds.

And he meets Nikita.

Well, ‘meets’. By which he means she starts their conversation over comms by saying, “Hey, nerd, open this door for me?” And he says, “Yeah, open sesame,” in his best _we are not amused_ voice as he hacks the electronic lock, and she laughs, warm and rich and bright, like she didn’t just spend the last year living underground.

Nikita is wry and fierce, and not completely hopeless at computers. She tells dirty jokes on the comms, nudges him in briefings when Percy’s not looking, and wears dresses like they’re some kind of really hot snakeskin that she can shed and emerge anew.

She makes him think, _coffee_ , and he has learned to trust his first impressions.


End file.
